DOCUMENT is delighted to present All of the Parts, Faheem Majeed’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. Opening on April 18, 2025, the exhibition comprises two distinct bodies of newly realized works by the Chicago-based artist, curator, educator, and non-profit administrator.

Faheem Majeed’s practice focuses on institutional critique and centers collaboration as a tool to engage communities in meaningful dialogue. Since 2016, he is a co-director and founder of Floating Museum, an arts collective that creates new models exploring relationships between art, community, architecture, and public institutions. From 2005–11, Majeed served as executive director and curator at the South Side Community Art Center (SSCAC), the country’s oldest, independently run and continuously operating Black arts institution. During his tenure there, Majeed conceptualized the presence of holes on the SSCAC’s walls as potential microcosms, pocket dimensions, and expansive galaxies that can serve as portals to understand the impact of Black artistic and creative expression.

Majeed’s series Constellation (2024-2025) repurposes elements from Planting and Maintaining a Perennial Garden, an ongoing project of his that uses cedar panels modeled after the 1930s New Bauhaus wall treatment of SSCAC’s Margaret Burroughs Gallery. These panels, scarred by decades of art installations, community events, and caretaking, bear physical witness to Black cultural labor. Each nail hole, dent, or mark becomes a star in a speculative sky—evidence of presence, making, and legacy. Rusted nails affixed on the boards speak to the material’s potential to act as support for generations of Black artists. Rooted in Black cosmological thought, Constellation transforms institutional remnants into portals of possibility. It asks: how do we honor what came before while creating space for what’s yet to come? How do we chart new paths using the light of past labors? And how might the small, accumulated marks of presence—so often overlooked—be read as maps of survival, beauty, and rebirth?

Growing up in a home filled with African and African-inspired artwork, Majeed was surrounded by objects that symbolized cultural pride and an effort to reclaim a fractured lineage. His parents, like many Black Americans, adorned their walls with what was broadly termed “African Art”—not Igbo, Yoruba, Senufo, or Guera, but simply African. The specific origins were unknown, and perhaps, at the time, unknowable. What mattered most was the symbolic gesture—the reclaiming of something lost, stolen, or erased. In his new series of wall sculptures, All of the Parts (2025), Faheem Majeed uses traditional wood-carving techniques to replicate elements of African masks of unknown origin. Using pine, cedar, different wood stains, and shoe polish, each piece in the series isolates and reinterprets a segment of a traditional African mask—not to reconstruct the whole, but to sit with the fragments. To investigate what it means to yearn for a connection to something unknowable. These parts are not replicas; they are echoes. They represent gestures of reaching, of trying to understand, and perhaps to possess, something that feels essential yet intangible. This series asks what it means to collect in absence of clarity, to claim lineage without lineage, to piece together identity from fragments. It speaks to the legacy of diasporic disconnection—and the creativity, necessity, and tenderness found in the effort to reconnect.

Faheem Majeed (b. 1976, Chicago, IL) lives and works in Chicago. Majeed has presented solo exhibitions at KANEKO, Omaha, NE (2022); Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago, IL (2021); South Side Community Art Center, Chicago, IL (2020); Corvus Gallery, University of Chicago’s Laboratory School, Chicago (2019); SMFA at Tufts University, Boston, Massachusetts (2019); and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2015). His work has been featured in group exhibitions at institutions including Centre Pompidou, Paris, France (2023); High Line Art, New York, NY (2022); DuSable Museum, Chicago (2017); P!, New York, New York (2017); and School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago (2016). Majeed has received The Field and MacArthur Foundation’s Leaders for a New Chicago Award (2020), Joyce Foundation Award (2020), the Harpo Foundation Award (2016), and the Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Grant (2015).